The present disclosure relates to a software product. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to techniques for providing feedback to a user about an image of a financial document.
Advances in optical character recognition (OCR) allow information to be extracted from physical documents (or images of these documents). However, it is still often difficult to perform OCR on financial documents. For example, in the case of a W-2 form, there are usually multiple copies or instances of the relevant financial information in a given W-2 form, including Federal, State and Local copies of an individual's annual financial information. If the individual provides an image that includes all of these copies, the alphanumeric text in the image may be too small for an OCR technique to resolve or there may be too much information for the OCR technique to analyze accurately, i.e., the OCR technique may fail.
When such a failure occurs, it may be confusing and/or frustrating to the individual. In particular, they may not understand why the failure occurred or what to do to rectify it. Furthermore, the individual may be forced to manually enter the financial information from the financial document for subsequent use by financial software (such as income-tax preparation software). However, manual entry of data is time-consuming, frustrating and prone to error. Consequently, the difficulties in performing OCR on financial documents may decrease the satisfaction (and, thus, the retention) of users of financial software.